[Author’s note: As I write this in October, the second massive denial of service attack in two weeks threatening to take down significant sections of the internet has just ended. Could full implementation of Operation Safety-Net have prevented this?

M3AAWG has issued its first report examining the level of bot infections on consumer networks and the percentage of subscribers notified. This is significant in that it is the first cooperative effort by network service providers to quantify the extent of malicious bots infecting their subscribers. The M3AAWG Bot Metrics Report also provides data on the implementation of a portion of the Anti-Bot Code of Conduct for ISPs developed at the FCC’s Communications Security Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) under the leadership of M3AAWG Chairman Emeritus Michael O’Reirdan.

M3AAWG has a long history of featuring diverse keynotes as part of its members-only meetings, with speakers ranging from noted cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs to General David B. Warner of the U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSC) to Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, among others.

M3AAWG was formed almost ten years ago over concerns that email, one of the Internet’s two “killer apps” at the time, might collapse due to out-of-control volumes of spam. Fortunately today, even with vastly more spam bombarding the networks, our operator members report they’re now able to stop about 90 percent of abusive messages before they reach users’ inboxes, per our email metrics reporting program.